Greg Umstead likes to describe himself as a ‘recovering perfectionist’. Having been involved in youth lacrosse and coaching for over a decade, Umstead learned the idea behind perfection—whether it’s in business or sports—lies in a diversified approach: ‘there is always a time to teach, a time to plan strategies and a time to stand back and let the team execute’.

As the CEO at Everest Customer Solutions, Umstead applies the same principle to his company to encourage business processing and efficiency. “At Everest, we work to continually evolve: trying new technologies and methods to achieve a vision for our customers, improving processes or skills when we see an opportunity,” he says.

Umstead’s quest for perfection can be seen through Everest Customer Solutions, his company that serves the pharmaceutical industry with its advanced solutions targeted at integrating various business tools into a single platform to derive efficiency from business practices. The company achieves this through its fully-featured CRM solution that incorporates marketing automation, data analytics, business intelligence, web and social media.

Pharma’s Evolving Lifecycle

According to Umstead, the pharmaceutical industry is in the midst of extreme transformational changes induced by multiple factors. For instance, the limited access to physicians and strict pharma policies has restricted promotional spending, and the growth of Integrated Delivery Networks has significantly impacted treatment selection decisions across the sector. Further, many of the selling tools have been over simplified based on an older selling model that now has limited impact. “Apart from rare diseases and some biotech drugs, pharma has had a hard time bringing strongly differentiated medicines to market. It has compelled the sector to seek smaller partners for inventing truly innovative products with integrated solutions,” asserts Umstead. Following his thought, Everest Customer Solutions accelerate pharma operations by providing customized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and social media solutions. The company also specializes in Business Intelligence solutions, web and database application development as well as data analytics.

Valued CRM Processing for Client Benefit

Umstead has over two decades of entrepreneurial experience in technology solutions in manufacturing, sales and marketing, and commercial operations. This justifies Everest’s competency to infuse new technologies into its core solutions to streamline their clients’ businesses. The company analyzes the customer’s sales, marketing and service processes to design and develop solutions that best fit into the customer’s business processes. These solutions can include any number of customized components such as integrating web forms for lead capture, segmenting customers based on sales, tracking responses and measuring campaign returns, and more.

Moreover, according to Umstead, Microsoft has efficiently evolved the Dynamics CRM platform to match or exceed other SaaS vendors’ capabilities while enabling nearly unlimited integration and creating optimized toolsets. “The Dynamics CRM platform, despite having added features, costs almost half of that of other popular SaaS platforms,” he says. Against this backdrop, he geared the company to assist a small startup pharma with a tight budget to establish their CRM platform on Microsoft Dynamics. It included creation of a tablet-based mobile front-end customized to the client’s sales process and delivered this capability even before Microsoft released a viable tablet interface. “CRM continues to be a viable technology investment for companies because the capabilities continue to grow, the cost has come down, and the market is rich with adept products,” says Umstead. He positioned Everest Customer Solutions to address the persistent problem of tailoring the tools to enable new models of customer engagement for the industry, and establishing processes for the organization.

Our evaluation always goes back to understanding the efficiency of any specific new technology in providing better value or capability to the client

Compelling Business Proposition

Sustaining Umstead’s agenda of client fulfillment, Everest complements all its solutions with consulting services. These services are aimed at defining the client’s data management and cross-functional business processes across the sales teams, patient hub, medical affairs and marketing teams.

Moreover, the rising anticipation for mobile applications and improved data analytics has compelled companies to review the needs of the pharmaceutical industry from an IT standpoint. Influenced by this need, coupled with Umstead’s strong understanding of the market and its business needs, Everest Customer Solutions closely scrutinizes the IT perspective of the pharma industry as it continues to review the latest web services, cloud solutions, Big Data and various other technological developments. “Our technology evaluation always goes back to understanding the efficiency of any specific new technology in providing better value or capability to the client,” asserts Umstead.

For instance, Umstead and his team built a managed markets forecasting and predictive modeling tool that enabled deep analytics for a client to support payer contracting negotiations. “In the initial year of use, it saved that customer millions of dollars,” says Umstead. “As the customer’s business evolved over seven years, we continued to add capabilities to the tool to enable modeling on a mass scale, and new business scenarios around copay variables and other analytic and segmentation capabilities.”

Outlook on the Future

Umstead’s approach toward cultivating long-term relationships with customers and building business through happy referrals encourages Everest Customer Solutions to continuously evaluate and evolve the business to meet their customers’ needs. “We look forward to a healthy relationship with our clients. Therefore, we provide solutions that bring a positive impact to our clients’ business and will also continue to evolve over time providing added values,” he says.

Umstead realizes the need for improved data analytics, both in-house and mobile, and bakes that functionality into everything Everest does today, even outside of pharma industry. He considers the technology progress in these areas may be outpacing the industry’s collective ability to deploy it, “but the mantra to simplify is at odds with the evolving complexity of their commercial model and the data around it,” he explains.

For the company’s future, Umstead foresees pursuing its participation toward the growth of Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences industry in 2015, while also diversifying to other markets where the company’s integrated CRM, web and digital marketing solutions add value. “Small-to-mid-sized businesses have been an area of tremendous growth for us recently because the cost of game-changing technologies has dropped to within their reach. Also, we have just launched a new and exciting pilot project in another vertical and hope to launch it in the second quarter of this year,” Umstead concludes.